I have need of angels*

         

       I read The Blacks: A Clown Show in the early 1970's in a literature class at the University of Texas at Austin.  I was not a theatre major, nor an English major, just a student interested in writing.  Genet's play was a revolution to me.
       In 2000, I began writing, I would say, professionally, but there has been little monetary reward.  (My wife loves me.)  I wrote screenplays that got smaller and smaller.  Finally, I turned to the stage, not for love or money, but because that's what I was writing... stage plays.
       I reacquainted myself with the plays of my college days.  Happy Days by Samuel Beckett, Comedians by Trevor Griffiths,  Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard, Heartbreak House by G. B. Shaw, A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen, The Frogs by Aristophanes, and, of course, The Blacks: A Clown Show by Jean Genet.
       "Theatre of Cruelty" matched my sensibilities; what Trevor Griffiths called "aggressively unfunny" at the end of Comedians.
       It looks like a joke and smells like a joke, but nobody laughs.
       And then my mentor and friend and a man I loved died, Ramon Carver.  Ramon loved my plays, while giving me wonderful critiques.  
       My plays grew bolder and more outspoken... and weirder.  
       I got more rejections.
       The last play I wrote was angry and hostile.  My wife asked me when I first described it to her, "Don't you want to get produced?"
       This was an important question and the answer is the answer every playwright should want to give...
       "Of course!"
       I stopped working on the new play and wrote a different play.  The play was still challenging, but much less angry.  It was sadder... but still weird.  (Not sure I can be other than weird.)
       I did finish the play I had been working on before the my wife's vital question.  It will probably never be produced.
       And more rejections.
       The sadness of the death of my mentor and the constant rejections led me to wonder if this was really what I should be doing.
       Since you're reading this, I will presume that you guessed my answer.
       Yes.  This is what I should and want to do.  Write plays.
       But maybe not the kind of plays I was writing.
       I asked myself what kind of plays does the theatre want, not, what kind of plays do I want to write.
       I looked at what was being produced and I thought about what I recalled being produced and I realized the strangest thing.
       The modern theatre as an art form is risk averse.
       The theatre as an institution is filled with wonderful, wildly liberal people, but the art is risk averse... and, dare I say, small "c," conservative.
       I have written plays to provoke and challenge and anger audiences.  Of course no one wants to put them on.
       I can understand this.  Audiences for live theatre are small enough.  Plays that alienate the audience, plays that threaten or provoke, plays that anger, may lead a portion of the small audience for live theatre to pause and think before the next time they buy a ticket.
       Of course, plays that challenge an audience's comfort do get produced, but they are few are far between.  And I must say that most of them end with some note of hope that things can and will be different.  A note generally lacking from my plays.
       And maybe there is far too much of this lack of hope in the daily news cycle for an audience to want to subject themselves to this on an evening they have gone out to be entertained, and evening to forget the pain of the modern world.
       I understand.
       No more #DeadMommyJokes... at least until I'm rich and famous...  maybe...

*Antonin Artaud, Lettres à Génica Athanasiou